Wrongful: Stories of Justice Denied and Redeemed

Miscarriages of justice happen in every jurisdiction. But in Western Australia, they’ve earned something of a world-class reputation for getting it wrong. And the human cost of those "mistakes" continues to multiply.

Wrongful opens the casefile on four head-spinning stories of wrongful conviction, told from the inside, by the journalists who covered them, the lawyers who argued them, the police who investigated them — and from the falsely accused who lived through the nightmare.

Darryl Beamish was a profoundly deaf teenager when he was charged with the 1959 axe murder of glamorous young Perth socialite Jillian Brewer. The Beamish case would take fifty years to resolve, and remains as a landmark case of the miscarriage of justice.

On the eve of his 19th birthday, in February 1963, John Button's life changed forever, when he was accused of the manslaughter of his girlfriend in a hit and run accident on the streets of Perth. It took nearly half a century to prove his innocence.

In 1994 mother-of-two, Pamela Lawrence, was murdered Andrew Mallard would make one of the most unorthodox "confessions" in the annals of criminal justice and virtually every single part of the justice system fell down..

On a sweltering February night in 2010, the destinies of two 21-year-olds — one white, and one black collided fatally on a deserted road outside of Broome. Gene Gibson, a cognitively impaired Pintubi man, was caught in the failures of the justice system.

Journalist, broadcaster and social critic Dr. Susan Maushart is the author of five books, a prolific independent audio producer exploring topics ranging from sex and dating, to the benefits of boredom, to true crime.